Kindlehighlight Quotes

A child’s bond to her mother cannot be understated, and my bond with Helen was a ragged, baffling, disheartening, chaotic mess. I felt crazy, often, around my own mother. I grew up questioning what was normal, asking what reality was and wasn’t, and not trusting the outcome of different situations. She scared me and I couldn’t predict her behavior, so I was often off-kilter and worried.

~ Cathy Lamb

Has a sense of humor. (Preferably warped.) We know who we are

~ Susan Scott

A child’s stories are simpler to understand because the language has not been developed to the point of high abstraction. An adult tells stories far more obtuse in nature.

~ John S. Savage

Okay, so there’s just you. Your goals, your career, your crew, your prospects, and your God. All together, chillin’. Before the house, the apartment, the kids, the boyfriend, the wedding, the night you crossed over with your frat brothers, there’s that pivotal point of asking your heart, “Who am I, really? What do I really like? Do I want to change for someone else? Is my soul mate right now, somewhere, finishing this sentence and completing my thoughts?

~ Kirk Franklin

This is a story of how a Baggins had an adventure, and found himself doing and saying things altogether unexpected.

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

God is in the business of strategically positioning us in the right place at the right time. A sense of destiny is our birthright as followers of Christ. God is awfully good at getting us where He wants us to go. But here’s the catch: The right place often seems like the wrong place, and the right time often seems like the wrong time.

~ Mark Batterson

The only real difference between a wise man and a fool, Moore knew, was that the wise man tended to make more serious mistakes—and only because no one trusted a fool with really crucial decisions; only the wise had the opportunity to lose battles, or nations.

~ Tom Clancy

You know that kind of quiver that trembles around through you when you are seeing something so strange and enchanting and wonderful that it is just a fearful joy to be alive and look at it; and you know how you gaze, and your lips turn dry and your breath comes short, but you wouldn't be anywhere but there, not for the world.

~ Mark Twain

It doesn't promise to solve or erase suffering but to transform it, pledging that by loving one another, even through pain, we will find more life. And it insists that by opening ourselves to strangers, the despised or frightening or unintelligible other, we will see more and more of the holy, since, without exception, all people are one body: God's.

~ Sara Miles

for God's sake, let's be done with the hypocrisy of claiming I am a biblical literalist when everyone is a selective literalist, especially those who swear by the antihomosexual laws in the Book of Leviticus and then feast on barbecued ribs and delight in Monday-night football, for it is toevali, an abomination, not only to eat pork but merely to touch the skin of a dead pig.

~ Walter Wink

She likes us,” said Umbo. “I know, I could feel it too,” said Rigg. “She’s really glad to have us here. I think she loves us like her own children.” “Whom she murdered and cut up into the stew.” “They were delicious.

~ Orson Scott Card

That’s kind of creepy

~ Amanda Hocking

In the new American ghetto, the nightmare engine is bubble economics, a kind of high-tech casino scam that kills neighborhoods just like dope does, only the product is credit, not crack or heroin. It concentrates the money of the population in just a few hands with brutal efficiency, just like narco-business, and just as in narco-business the product itself, debt, steadily demoralizes the customer to the point where he’s unable to prevent himself from being continually dominated.

~ Matt Taibbi

Here’s exclusive Channel 5 video of a local man having his brain eaten by a winged gremlin. Local gremlin experts warn that—

~ David Wong

I was always amused by the prayers of the saintly. “God do this, God don’t do that.” I thought God probably laughed at them too, unless He was a little annoyed by their temerity.

~ Jean Plaidy

the way it always did.

~ Amanda Hocking

Jack looked out the window as they passed the Mormon temple, just outside the beltway near Connecticut Avenue. A decidedly odd-looking building, it had grandeur with its marble columns and gilt spires. The beliefs represented by that impressive structure seemed curious to Ryan, a lifelong Catholic, but the people who held them were honest and hardworking, and fiercely loyal to their country, because they believed in what America stood for.

~ Tom Clancy

People who work in offices are crazy, they create an environment they hate, write rules they want to break, cast each other in roles they despise. It’s like they’re sixth formers in an end of term drama acting out the agony of everything they fear most in their life but they forget to end the play.

~ Helen Smith

Ah, Death, the spectre which sate at all feasts! How often, Monos, did we lose ourselves in speculations upon its nature! How mysteriously did it act as a check to human bliss - saying unto it thus far, and no farther!

~ Edgar Allan Poe

But, if one cuts more deeply, the lonesome dove is Newt, a lonely teenager who is the unacknowledged son of Captain Call and a kindly whore named Maggie, who is now dead. So the central theme of the novel is not the stocking of Montana but unacknowledged paternity. All of the Hat Creek Outfit, including particularly Augustus McCrae, want Call to accept the boy as his son.

~ Larry Mcmurtry

Obedience to commandments is the way we build a foundation of truth. Here is the way that works, in words so simple that a child could understand: The truth of most worth is to know God our Heavenly Father, His Son, Jesus Christ, and Their plan for us to have eternal life with Them in families. When God communicates that priceless truth to us, He does it by the Spirit of Truth. We have to ask for it in prayer. Then He sends us a small part of that truth by the Spirit. It comes to our hearts and minds. It feels good, like the light from the sun shining through the clouds on a dark day. He sends...

~ Henry B. Eyring

He fell in love with a skinny stray cat that would skulk around the dining hall during meals. Every day, Jake would offer it sausage or egg from breakfast and pepperoni or hamburger from lunch. Every day, it ran away from him. But Jake didn’t give up. Even when he had the stomach flu, he snuck out of the infirmary to try to feed it. He was not going to let it down. He would watch it from classroom windows. He even made up a poem about it that he sent home to his mother in a letter. Three months later, the little cat was finally hungry enough to trust him. It never occurred to Jake that the cat...

~ Sarah Addison Allen

the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water

~ Virginia Woolf

What are the distinctive characteristics, or marks, of personality? Knowledge, feeling or emotion, and will. Any entity that thinks and feels and wills is a person.

~ R.a. Torrey

He is intelligent enough to get a job that would earn him good money, but too clever to want one.

~ Helen Smith

There are at least four distinct lines of proof in the Bible that the Holy Spirit is a person.

~ R.a. Torrey

Josey?” She heard her mother’s voice in the hall, then the thud of her cane as she came closer. “Please don’t tell her I’m here,” the woman in the closet said, with a strange sort of desperation. Despite the cold outside, she was wearing a cropped white shirt and tight dark blue jeans that sat low, revealing a tattoo of a broken heart on her hip. Her hair was bleached white-blond with about an inch of silver-sprinkled dark roots showing. Her mascara had run and there were black streaks on her cheeks. She looked drip-dried, like she’d been walking in the rain, though there hadn’t...

~ Sarah Addison Allen

In fact the problem Leopardi is facing is speculative and metaphysical, a problem in the history of philosophy from Parmenides to Descartes and Kant: the relationship between the idea of infinity as absolute space and absolute time, and our empirical knowledge of space and time.

~ Italo Calvino

For if you keep my commandments you shall receive of his fulness, and be glorified in me as I am in the Father; therefore, I say unto you, you shall receive grace for grace (D&C 93:19–20). And then a few verses later the Lord says: And truth is knowledge of things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come; And whatsoever is more or less than this is the spirit of that wicked one who was a liar from the beginning. The Spirit of truth is of God. I am the Spirit of truth, and John bore record of me, saying: He received a fulness of truth, yea, even of all truth; And no man receiveth...

~ Henry B. Eyring

Intelligence is the door to freedom and alert attention is the mother of intelligence.

~ Jon Kabat-Zinn

From the perspective of meditation, every state is a special state, every moment a special moment.

~ Jon Kabat-Zinn

We are primarily the products of thinking that happens below the level of awareness.

~ David Brooks

Come with me, ladies and gentlemen who are in any wise weary of London: come with me: and those that tire at all of the world we know: for we have new worlds here.

~ Lord Dunsany

Here come the lovers, full of joy and mirth.— Joy, gentle friends! joy and fresh days of love Accompany your hearts!

~ William Shakespeare

virtue does not spring from riches, but riches and all other human blessings, both private and public, from virtue.

~ Plato

Jesus opens his arms to his needy children and says, “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28, NASB). The criteria for coming to Jesus is weariness. Come overwhelmed with life. Come with your wandering mind. Come messy. What does it feel like to be weary? You have trouble concentrating. The problems of the day are like claws in your brain. You feel pummeled by life. What does heavy-laden feel like? Same thing. You have so many problems you don’t even know where to start. You can’t do life on your own anymore. Jesus wants you to come to him...

~ Paul Miller

More than half described Christians as literalistic, anti-intellectual, judgmental, self-righteous, and bigoted.

~ Marcus J. Borg

The notion of sitting down and conjuring up, not only words in which to clothe thoughts but thoughts worthy of being clothed--the whole thing was absurdly beyond his desires.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I’m saying there is evil in the world,” Master Kit said, hefting the box on his hip, “and doubt is the weapon that guards against it.

~ Daniel Abraham

It’s a beautiful way to put it: Leave the poetry in what you make. When something becomes too polished, it loses its soul. It seems robotic.

~ Jason Fried